The piece above is called Planetary Alignment, and it’s one of several of Dillon’s works getting the spotlight over at the Racialicious Tumblr, curated with love by Andrea. Hop on over sometime for more day-to-day R-style goodness.

By Guest Contributor Mattie Brice, cross-posted from Kotaku

Tamagotchi. Remember those?

They became popular when I was in 4th grade. Sometimes my mother took me to a nearby Target to pick a toy- she told me it was for good grades, but I knew it was because I got bullied often at school. One of these times, I raced to find a Tamagotchi, as all of my friends were getting them. I liked the idea of something with me at all times, to take care of it and make me feel like something needed me.

And there it was, a whole wall of glittering purple eggs. I remember that exact, uncreative display panel to this day, and my mother stopping me. She told me to wait, that my aunt wanted to get that for my birthday when she visited. I protested, but the answer was the same: be patient, you’ll get it soon enough. We went a week later and all of them were gone, sold out from every toy store in our area. For some reason that memory is lodged in my brain. I brought it up to my mother recently, but she’s forgotten.

The stray times I visit Kotaku, it’s like I’m seeing an empty panel that the reward for my sitting, smiling, and internalizing should be. I was supposed to find somewhere to escape to, maybe even a place that needed me a little. You told me to wait, and I did. Where’s my Tamagotchi?

There is only a wrong way to go about this. So let’s just get to why I’m here:

Me too.

I’m part of the gaming community, but Kotaku doesn’t see me as a gamer. No, instead I’m a multi-racial transgender who-knows-sexual possibly-feminist woman gamer. A boogie monster. Someone who uses too many –isms and –ists in their daily tweets to actually enjoy anything. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone ask what it’s like to be me in this pocket of society.

You know that invisible ink in detective movies? If you could get an internet lighter, you’d find “This site is for heterosexual white American men gamers.” Kotaku will never include me until it’s figured out that “gamers” is skewed to one identity and asks me to deal with that. No. Me too.

Gamer culture isn’t Kotaku’s fault. That skewing Japan as a land of weirdoes is humorous. That gamers like to look at galleries made up of T&A shots of women in cosplay. So what if someone like me doesn’t fit in with typical gamers? The editors are just providing what gamers want, how is that a bad thing? Are you using that lighter?

When I wasn’t bullied as a child, I was creating games. My favorite thing to do was to give my friends superpowers based on their personalities. When we played, they were empowered to be themselves. It was always fun because each one of us mattered. I mattered. Ever since, I knew I wanted to be involved with games, maybe even make them. I contemplate what I would say to kid-me now that I figured out what a gamer is. What kind of treatment I would receive if I ever got into the industry. Would it be more humane to convince my past self I didn’t actually matter?

I’ve turned away from Kotaku because it doesn’t like my answers. There’s a reason I can’t find you bountiful resources of sexually liberated cosplayers not posing for straight guys. [I had asked Mattie to help me find some sources of cosplay images more in line with what she would like to see on the site. — Kotaku Editorial Director Joel Johnson] Why there’s a scant amount of criticism of manchild culture. How the LGBT community is still the elephant in the room. We haven’t thought of what a gamer community that assumes diversity instead of homophobic adolescent dudes looks like. There are plenty of stats of who the “average” gamer is, what the actual demographics are. However, the image in our mind hasn’t changed in decades.

There’s a taboo against saying that. Me too. It’s radical liberal talk, an attempt to kill everyone’s fun. The common denominator response is “Why won’t you just go somewhere else?” I usually do. This attitude polarizes the community between large, mean-spirited marches of “the old guard” and a few impenetrable bastions of rigid but progressive niche philosophies. I’ve run to places like The Border House because “me too” isn’t deliberated upon, it’s the law. I turn away because Kotaku doesn’t ask me “Why are you leaving?”

Me too.

I’ve stared at those two words and deleted them often enough that I forget what they mean. I can’t say those words here without preparing myself for the sling-fest, and some days I just can’t summon the strength. This is after I go through my life dealing with crap society presents me just because I exist. And you know what sucks? That many times, my words are shrugged off, or given the fatal “I’ll think about it.” That isn’t inclusivity. Being benign doesn’t help. Letting commenters spew toxic isn’t inviting. Looking to defend yourselves doesn’t solve anything when it’s so obvious there’s a problem. I’m not looking to shame you, I just want to set things right.

Must I be a martyr? Must you be a machine? Are our only choices to become symbols and lose our humanity? Do you understand what you’re asking of me when you tell me to be patient? Do you know how long I’ve been waiting?

The games I play now won’t let me be myself. No game dares to feature a transgender character that isn’t on the wrong end of a joke. Sometimes I pretend that my party members know, but are too scared to ask. God, I don’t even know if most actual people know what it means to be transgender. Or multi-racial. Or anything other than what they are. I don’t know if they know it’s okay to ask. Then maybe we could figure out what a gamer really is. Halfway isn’t enough, but I will accompany you on the journey.

I wish Kotaku would tell me “We don’t want you to go away.” You’ll have to scroll down a bit to see if that comes true.

Me too.

I really, really wanted to like CNN’s Black in America 4: The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley (which premiered last night) as well as Miss Representation, a documentary currently airing on OWN. Both, however, left me feeling the same way, which looks something like this:

A couple of synopses before I state why I felt this way:

Black in America 4 explores the rarely discussed facts and stories of Black people in digital technology, especially those who are inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Host Soledad O’Brien frames this through the stories of eight African American entrepreneurs who move into together as part of digital business owners Angela Benton’s and Wayne Sutton’s NewME Accelerator program, which provides Black entrepreneurs time and (relative) quiet space—and possible connections with venture capitalists—for their business ideas.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s Miss Representation connects some of the dots between the stats, the personal stories, and media images about women and how those images affect not only those in the media— Margaret Cho recounts the fatphobia and other drama around her 1994 comedy All American Girl — but also those consuming the media, meaning the rest of us.

Now, I know that both shows are, respectively, very much Black Studies and Women’s Studies 101, presented as and for those who may know very little to nothing about either Black tech innovators and owners or media literacy and feminism. So, I can see both try to provide a “hook” for their audiences with that in mind. However, the way their respective creative teams frame their stories does both topics a disservice.

When I asked O’Brien about the aim of this installment at a preview screening, she said, “First of all, [Blacks] are clearly using the technology, but we’re not innovating the technology. And Silicon Valley keeps saying how colorblind it is. So, this part of the series examines that statement.”

Watching BiA4, I felt like I was watching O’Brien trying to mash a news report with a reality show. (“Watch what happens when tech-y Black folks get real…with Soledad O’Brien!”) I can understand that the NewME Accelerator was a good (and, from a seeing-news-as-a-business standpoint, a fiscally feasible way) for CNN to gather a group of Black tech business owners (and the non-Black people who attempt to help and/or comment on them) to tell a relatable narrative about the dearth of Black people in the field.  (BiA4 states early on that less than 1% of digital entrepreneurs are Black. The majority, it says, are white, young, Ivy League and first-tier university drop-outs, which, as pointed out in the post-screening Q&A screening I attended, is a privilege unto itself as far as starting businesses.) But I actually think a better way to tell both stories is to decouple them. If I could reconstruct the story, I would have had O’Brien, say, follow one or two Black digital entrepreneurs in depth as they attempted to get investors and utilized Benton and Sutton as pundits— along with angel investor/philanthropist Mitch Kapor, who directly refutes Michael Arrington’s claim of the digital ownership as “meritorious.” Or I would have followed the NewME Accelerator crew as the main subjects of a full-length documentary to air on CNN.

Also, another questionable point is how Asians and Asian Americans are considered in this report. The show starts off by saying that the tech-innovation worlds are “white and Asian.” Though the presence of Asians and Asian Americans should not lead to Arrington’s erroneous conclusion that the tech world is, therefore, “colorblind,” the presence of Asian and Asian Americans shouldn’t be discounted as failing to bring racial diversity to tech communities. The more subtle equation BiA4 makes, however, is “Black=racial diversity.”

At least BiA4 addresses, albeit imperfectly, race and racism in the tech field, Miss Representation — for all of the visually racial diversity (you see Cho, former Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice, Dreamworlds director Sut Jhally, media-literacy advocate Malkia Cyril, and Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker, among others) — fails to talk about the issue of race and racism. When I asked why at a post-screening Q&A, the response was “We only had 90 minutes, though we’re planning a second movie to deal with race.” (Refer to image at top of this post.)

However, there were places in the film where race and racism could be mentioned, and it would have taken about 30 seconds. For example, a young Black woman talks about her hair and how media images make her feel about it. The narrator could easily say something like, “Far too many images we see in the media are of white women swinging long, flowing hair. Imagine how that would make a woman of color, whose hair may not do that, feel?”

I timed it: the quote took all of 15 seconds to read out loud. (I’ll be generous and give it about 30 seconds to account for dramatic voiceover.) Or even acknowledge that the majority of media images—both in the film and in entertainment itself, from news to shows to porn—are mostly of white women as both idealized and in variety of roles…and these are, quite a bit of the time, functioning in tandem. Again, all of a thirty-second voiceover or a statistic that could be one of many the film uses to further its argument on how the media hurts women and other people. The silence about race (actress Rosario Dawson is the only person who explicitly mentions “people of color”) — as well as class, gender identity, sexual identity, and  and physical ability, though the film does give a nod at how the media, especially television, fails to acknowledge women above the age of 35 as an audience or as characters — flattens the documentary’s discussion about women to the category of “woman,” as if female-presenting people all suffer from media images the same way. Of course, we don’t.

And I just quite can’t with Black in America 4 and Miss Representation.

Image credit: Bossip

Longtime Racialicious readers know this time on the calendar has prompted the R to read someone (or several folks) about their racist costumes or some other Halloween-related foolishness. Well, this year, Ohio University’s Students Teaching about Racism in Society (STARS) put on posters what we’ve been putting into words for quite a while.

I think that, for the most part, the campaign deserves the accolades, coverage, and support it’s been getting around the web, from Angry Asian Man to the 17,575 (and counting!) responses on the STARS president’s Tumblr to The Root to Bitch to the former Racialicious owner Carmen Sognonvi .

Of course, we can argue, among other things, that phenotypes don’t equal culture and cultures aren’t static or even talk about the historical-religious appropriation of Halloween itself.

My only quibble with the campaign is that I may have chosen photos where the models conveyed different body language. Not that the models didn’t pose how they wanted, being a student-driven campaign. What I do think is quite a few photographers rarely get The Shot in one shot; in fact, several photographers submit several photos for clients/collaborative partners to choose from.

I would have chosen, say, the Latino looking down at the photo, the East Asian woman giving the “geisha” picture the side-eye. Or all of the models giving their respective photos the side-eye. Or all of them looking out at the viewer. Or all of them looking down. As is, the photo of the East Asian woman looking down may suggest non-confrontation (“meek Asian girl”)

juxtaposed with the men of color (the photo at the top of the post and this one)

and the Black woman

may  inadvertently suggest stereotypes of anger and aggression (“angry Arab,” “Latino with a temper,” “aggressive Black woman”). Just a thought if and when STARS decides to tweak this incredible campaign.

But, again, that’s my only quibble. STARS did a wild-applause-and-rose-tossing job with this campaign.

Others, however, have taken this serious and timely message and parodied—if not downright attacked–it. (Color me unshocked by this, Racializens.) Now, some of the parodies made me chuckle, like this Avatar-based one

and the zombie one

mostly due to the ideas of the creatures being symbols for people of color.

The ones about white people, especially poor whites, produced mixed results mostly because the parodies don’t quite grasp that, yes, poor white people do have a mitigated privilege via their skin color and that white people of various class standings making fun of poor whites may be viewed as “inside joking,”

but white poverty is also thoroughly ridiculed and dismissed—and, therefore erased–in US society by that very same mitigated privilege.

Oh, and let’s not forget the sexism and the fatphobia in these parodies.

As we’ve witnessed in our posts about racism in costuming, people have rushed to defend their choice to dress up in racially offensive Halloween garb in some of the comment sections about the campaigns, with the usual mixture of the “I got my rights!”, “my best [insert race and/or ethnicity here] friend/partner/co-worker/neighbor didn’t find my costume offensive,” (bonus points if the person saying this is a person of color wears the stereotyping costume of a PoC culture), “y’all are being oversensitive/overemotional/hostile,” “you’re the racist for calling out my racism,” and other derailing techniques.

Some of the Derailing/Apologist/Other-Blaming hits and remixes?

From “Jerry Stein” at Autostraddle

OMG, get a life. This is pathetic. Would an Asian woman be OK to go as a Geisha on Halloween? If not why not? And if so are we now saying that only people of the exact origin or race can have fun dressed as a CHARACTER on Halloween? Stop being so sensitive. If America is to get passed all of this nonsense then it needs to get some perspective and start smiling again.

Watch any movie or TV show and you will see a racial stereotype. Are all stereotypes negative NO! Why is it that this campaign only sees that.

This country is dividing itself. Nobody wants to be American. Everyone is so narcissistic and self important it makes me sick to my stomach. Bring back people with humility and a sense of humor before we all end up selfish deluded idiots thinking the world owes them something.

Based on this all costumes which feature Cowboys, Irish Leprechauns, Michael Jackson, Lady GaGa, Bin Laden, OJ Simpson, Madonna, Jersey Shore cast members will all now be banned because they offend the Irish, African Americans, Italians and Muslims. Thats pretty much Halloween cancelled.

This country is becoming a laughing stock for the wrong reasons.

Mohamhead from GOOD

I am not white myself but I don’t see what’s wrong with people doing that kind on stuff on Halloween. I might even dress up as a white guy. Is that racist too? Or is it only racist if white people do it? Hypocrites.

didimydoe3, also at GOOD

I don’t mind stereotypical costumes of my race because I’m mature enough to know it’s a costume.

Sometimes it is offensive. Mine is. It’s the only reason I’m doing it. I’m going blackface.

Oh, I could go on and on and on with these kinds of comments–because these comments are out there ad nauseum–but you get the jist.

But see, here’s the thing, People Who Defend Racist Costumes: you all are proving STARS’—and Racialicious’—point…and quite well. You’re welcome.

As Bitch’s headline says, don’t mess up as you dress up, and have a Happy Halloween!

Image credits: Uproxx and Hard to Be Humble When You Stuntin on a Jumbotron

The problem, as many bloggers have pointed out, is that the ad relies on the trope of the savage black man, an idea as old as the nation that has only changed rather than disappeared over time. Today, there are “good” and “bad” black men – the former are what then Senator Joe Biden thinks are “articulate and bright and clean” and the latter are probably what he sees on the Music Television. It must have been quite a shock for Biden to see that then Senator Obama did not end his campaign speeches with Yo yo! 

The recent Times piece on black dandyism, “Pushing the Boundaries of Black Style,” which ran just a day before the Nivea controversy, has received a favorable reception. And yet for me, raises feelings of unease not unlike the Nivea ad. While the article is a celebration of the style and savvy of the bloggers of Street Etiquette, Travis Gumbs and Joshua Kissi, the article takes on a slight tone of wonderment I imagine Biden experienced when he saw this young, black man whip him during the Iowa caucuses.

I should be clear: Street Etiquette is one of the best personal style blogs out there. It has everything that any reader interested in fashion would want: history, know-how, cool, and lots of shiny photos of beautiful people. And yet, I found the language they used to champion black dandyism to be uncomfortably reminiscent of the Nivea ad. Speaking about his blog, Kissi says, “It shows people of African descent in a good light…Where they’re from and where I’m from, self-refinement isn’t welcome in a sense.”

Throughout the piece, “dandyism” is posited as classy, refined, and aspirational, while “hip hop style” is imprecated as unrefined, coarse, and well, uncivilized. The black dandies are constantly trying to get away from the paradigm of hip-hop, but in doing so, embrace another, arguably more dominant, paradigm. As if there were any further indication needed, their largest photo shoot, “The Black Ivy” is a not-so-subtle embrace of “our kind of people.”

Furthermore, this “self-refinement” is expressed not simply as an evolution of style, but also one of growth. “I used to wear size 42 jeans. Coming from that to a tie and shirt, people perceive you in a whole different way,” says Kissi. He isn’t wrong. Those baggy pants have been quite a site of contention; in 2007, cities across the South passed anti-sagging pants ordinances. Legislators weren’t just trying to police fashion, but specifically, what they saw as an expression of a dangerous black masculinity. Atlanta Councilman C.T. Martin said such laws are a “remedy” for “a prison mentality.” Other lawmakers believed the style invoked fear in others. Ooga booga, indeed.

Is it possible for multiple expressions and styles to coexist? Mos Def, also quoted in the article, probably has it closest: “White people have all kinds of archetypes, from Brad Pitt to Al Bundy, everything in between. The cultural paradigms that are aggressively promoted to young black people and young poor people are extremely narrow.” Multiple style paradigms – and relatedly multiple masculinities – are vital, especially in communities of color. But does the ascension of one necessitate the denigration of another? Can’t I have my high-tops and wear them too?

“Slave Earrings” are in Vogue. Literally. According to the Italian fashion outlet, “Jewellery has always flirted with circular shapes, especially for use in making earrings. The most classic models are the slave and creole styles in gold hoops.”

Emphasis mine, ridiculousness… all theirs.

Two weeks ago, Vogue Italia found itself under a deluge of criticism for declaring “Slave Earrings” in fashion. Originally, they thought to qualify the name they gave them. “If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern United States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom. Colored stones, symbolic pendants and multiple spheres. And the evolution goes on.” Does it go on to declare “necklaces with detachable chains,” “hillbilly slingbacks,” and “Holocaust tattoos” in fashion? None of that is me, by the way, this is taken from the 21 pages of comments, nearly all chiding the wording choice in English and in Italian.

Allow me to fill you in on the latest: Vogue Italia gave an apology earlier last week that was more like an “Oops!” than anything. The style bible’s editor, Franca Sozzani released a statement Monday that said, “We apologise for the inconvenience. It is a matter of really bad translation from Italian into English.” Again, emphasis mine, but let’s be honest, the emphasis should have been theirs. They continued, “The Italian word, which defines those kind of earrings, should instead be translated into ‘ethnical style earrings.’ Again, we are sorry about this mistake which we have just amended in the website.”

From the myriad of complaints, tweets, and articles that has inspired this fashion nightmare, it was pointed out the word “ethnic” translates to “etnico” and slave is “schiavo” in Italian. Completely dissimilar words.  So obviously, Sozzani’s statement needs to be taken with a… grain of salt. My thought is, in the surprise this wording… mistake… caused, they had to say something. Like equate ethnicity to slavery. Oops! I think Iman said it best to Style Bistro: “Slave does not make it ethnic. Mind you, it’s not lost in translation–the word slave, we know what it is. They might as well have called them n***** earrings.” Snap. We should know by now that it’s best not to anger Iman. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson would be none too pleased, either.

Really, these earrings do originate from the time of slavery, however… let me throw out an example. Right now, I’m wearing a Calvin Klein buckled leather bracelet. I am not wearing a Calvin Klein shackle cuff. See the difference, Franca? I know this all may be confusing, but maybe the word should have been edited out before released to the public, as editors are wont to do. And what if, (and this is completely hypothetical of course) the model on the site was black?

Now do you see why that term shouldn’t have ever, ever, ever have been used? I felt wrong even cutting and pasting another face into this. Imagine how we feel knowing that you wrote, edited, approved, coded, and posted the article without even so much as a “Uh… guys?”

As of last Wednesday evening, the post holds a message saying, nay, shouting:

“WE’VE DECIDED TO REMOVE THE ARTICLE FROM THE SITE TO PROVE OUR GOOD FAITH AND TO SHOW IT WASN’T OUR INTENTION TO INSULT ANYONE”

Now, there’s a real apology. I think.

I so want to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, this isn’t their first language. Ignore the fact that it appeared in Italian as well. But, this is the same team that came up with mainstream fashion’s first all black issue. And they also started Vogue Black, even though I side-eye the name a little bit. I was talking to Sexual Correspondent Andrea Plaid about this, and she bought up something rather interesting:

“Vogue Italia is doing the post-racial mulitple-oppression sell: under the guise of thinking they’re being all ‘We did the Black Issue, so we’re cool in doing this’ using the myriad of oppressions of women of color to sell some damn gold-tone hoop earrings named after…WoCs’ oppression! And that oppression, in many cases, melded sexual oppression (Antebellum US, the Japanese and Korean “comfort women,” etc.) This, coming from the magazine whose brand is all about the sexy framed as stylishness.”

Though they may not deserve it, as a gesture of good faith, I took a peek around Vogue Italia’s trends section. Maybe this was just a one-off terrible mistake. And I found another post about… Jungle Bracelets. My first inclination was to shout “Why!?!” But, false alarm, as I read, there was nothing really- “…manchettes in python for a night marked by tribal rhythms,” huh? “Turn your evenings into “jungle nights” characterized by tribal music, wild dancing and a bit of aesthetic rebellion,” you say?

Less malevolent, sure. But I’m uncomfortable anyway, and while relatively tame, is this something to be angry about? Maybe. But, to be honest, should I be bracing myself for racism on their website now? Slave Ethnic Earrings should be completely gone from the site as that “gesture of good faith.” As of Wednesday afternoon, the Ethnic Earrings post is still up, complete with the slide show.

It shouldn’t be, so let’s all just face the fuc— I mean facts. Face the facts. I’m sorry, it was a really bad translation. But I caught myself.

Image credit: Vogue Italia and Joseph Lamour

At this point, it should go without saying that all the women referenced are white, as per usual. But whatever! Victory! More women on television is a reason to be thrilled, right? That is, until I see what’s being lauded:

Cummings’s multi-cam sitcom, Whitney, has an awful pilot, full of cynical innuendo, and yet one scene—sexual role-playing gone south—showed a glimmer of something, a dank, self-mocking Sandra Bernhard–esque allure. Sue me, but I can’t help rooting for Cummings, who seems to have something to say about the survival skills of damaged women, even if she hasn’t quite figured out what it is yet.

Luckily, Cummings’s other show, CBS’s 2 Broke Girls, which she produced with Sex and the City’s Michael Patrick King, has more potential. It stars the luscious Kat Dennings (from Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist) and Beth Behrs, playing waitresses at a greasy spoon in Williamsburg. Dennings wears knee-high boots and a working-class sneer; Behrs is a newly broke heiress. As the self-reliant cynic, Dennings is fantastic, making the most of acrid punch lines like “That’s not what rape feels like!”

Now, where have I heard about 2 Broke Girls, before? Oh, that’s right – Racebending:

The character, “Rice Lee,” is portrayed as a stereotypically backward and socially stunted Asian immigrant, who is repeatedly mocked and corrected by his white co-workers (including Max, one of the titular “broke girls.”)

LEE
Hello today. I have check for you.
MAX GLANCES AT HIS PANTS AS SHE TAKES THE CHECK.

MAX
Thanks, camel toe.

LEE
What means camel toe?

SHE POINTS TO HIS CROTCH WHERE THE PANTS ARE HIKED UP. HE LOOKS DOWN, EMBARRASSED.

LEE(CONT’D)
Oh. Okay.

Lee can’t wear his pants correctly, can’t speak English properly, and doesn’t understand the concept of holidays. Because it’s not like Koreans wear pants, take English in elementary school, and celebrate holidays like Christmas.

In short, “Rice” is a disaster of a character, like something out of a Long Duk Dong time machine. It’s such a shame given CBS was recently honored for improving the representation of Asian Americans on television, and just sponsored Banana II, the Asian American bloggers conference.

Angry Asian Man has more:

I’ve talked to several people who know a little something about what’s going on behind the scenes, and I’m told that the character has actually been re-written and re-tooled, largely based on the negative reaction to the original script. That’s positive news, right? Right? I don’t know.

I don’t know exactly what that means for the character, because as originally conceived, he needed one hell of an overhaul. I mean, that was seriously venturing deep into Long Duk Dong territory. It wasn’t pretty. But if someone’s at least trying to fix this mess, I’m willing to wait until fall to find out if the character still totally sucks. I guess we’ll have to see.

But these critiques are largely missed by the people cheering for women fronted shows. Nussbaum, in New York, spares just a sentence to describe the classic Hollywood racism we will be treated to this fall: “The script is uneven—the ensemble of stock ethnics gave me a migraine, as it did in several of these shows, all of which star model-pretty white women—but the show did a surprisingly good job at capturing a postcrash Brooklyn zeitgeist.” Sigh.

Another show we are supposed to look forward to? Girls, by Lena Dunham. The creator of Tiny Furniture nicely parlayed the film buzz into a show focused on 20something New Yorkers. But if this tweet is any indication of what she finds funny…

…expect more of the same old, same old.

We deal with this all the time, considering that content that is brilliant and amazing on one level can also be horrific and stereotypical on another. (Hello, In Living Color.) And if we boycott absolutely everything, we don’t give creators time to grow, change, and get better. But lines are continuously crossed, and it is eroding the tentative gains that nonwhites in entertainment have fought for. Since our greatest power as consumers is the power of veto, it is important to support shows we’d like to see and ignore or actively boycott ones that promote racism and sexism in entertainment. But the lines can get really blurry.

Harold and Kumar is a great example of this.

We’ve had a ton of conversations around the Harold and Kumar movies, especially in reference to how racial commentary was often insightful and hilarious, but a lot of the gags involving women presented the same one-dimensional sexist stereotypes. Here are some of the articles (comments lost, unfortunately):

GQ Writer Compares Harold and Kumar to “The Happy Go Lucky Negro” Caricature
Addicted to Race 88: What Harold and Kumar says about race and gender
Open Thread: Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
East West Talks to John Cho About Race and Hollywood [Cho-licious]

So, we had a dilemma. Do we support two talented actors, playing roles that are not stereotypical about Asian Americans in a major studio film? Or do we boycott because their treatment of gender in the films left a lot to be desired?

Archer, an animated show on FX, provides the same sort of tensions. About 80% of the time, the humor employed about race is hilarious and fairly subversive. This is a bit complicated by the fact that the writer, Adam Reed, is a white dude – though, admittedly, one who demonstrates he’s beyond a surface level understanding of race. Mitigating factor: Aisha Tyler joined up as Lana, which takes the humor to a whole other level.

The other 20% of the time? Hot mess and Asian stereotypes. And I don’t even know how to talk about the “Mulatto Butts” song:

And while Archer is blisteringly funny from a references/intelligent humor perspective, many of the female characters are basic archetypes – in a show where all the fun is taking these one-note characters to ridiculous heights. But we will discuss that a bit more when season 3 premieres.

Back to the fall tv line up.

The worst part of all this is that the 2 Broke Girls show actually seems like it would be pretty cute, in that How I Met Your Mother kind of way. The trouble is, when shows throw in racist stereotypes trying to be edgy since we’re post racial and all (a hallmark of hipster racism) a lot of times, they don’t know what they’re doing. You see, to make a joke about society, you have to understand how society works – and add some new and insightful observation. And in a lot of these shows, they are cracking jokes alright – but they are the same jokes that have been in play since the dawn of racism. Which is why you have characters named “Rice Lee” who fit every single Asian stereotype ever put on celluloid. It’s why in the promos, you have the same throwaway characters – if I never see a large, sassy black woman in a position of authority being mean to a defenseless little white girl again, it will be too soon. (Didn’t like it in Love Bites; don’t like it in the Whitney promo). It’s a lazy way to create a secondary character and a way to wring cheap laughs from the racist crowd.

But it’s also alienating. The producers have told Racebending they are retooling the character – Marissa at Racebending asked us to request screeners, which we won’t do.* When the show comes on, we will see what the changes are – at this point, we all know actors, especially POC, need all the work they can get. But this kind of laziness shouldn’t be rewarded with viewership. It isn’t enough just to point to the gender of the creator, I care about the quality of representation on screen. And just like we don’t need women created and fronted shows that pander to sexism, we for damn sure don’t need shows that use racism to shore up weak writing.

—

* We don’t really review screeners for the same reason we don’t try to review books anymore – no one has the time. As long as Racialicious is a side project for all of us involved, we’d rather focus our energies elsewhere. If it’s compelling enough, we will check it out on TV.

(Thanks Lilah!)

As I said on Twitter, Gloria: In Her Own Words, the new documentary about feminist activist Gloria Steinem running exclusively on HBO this month, is a “precise” work on her life and The Second Feminist Movement (and what I mean by this is the mainstream Second Wave Movement) in the last 60+ years.

Dana Goldstein took the doc to task in The Nation for not addressing race and racism in the movement Steinem helped shape:

Though there are interviews in Gloria about how upper-middle-class, straight feminists came to embrace lesbian rights and economic justice for poor women, there is no explicit discussion of an equally enduring and arguably more fraught issue: the relationship between feminism and struggles for racial equality. The film does feature archival footage showing 1970s white feminists arguing that men’s only bars are the equivalent of Jim Crow lunch counters. Doesn’t that contention cry out for debate, for analysis—for something? We see Steinem appear alongside her 1970s “speaking partners,” the black feminists Flo Kennedy (pictured above–Ed.) and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, but we don’t hear much about how these women (who were so often overshadowed by the more famous Steinem) navigated their dual identies as women of color within the feminist movement.

Steinem notes that her own brand of feminism was more radical than that of her elders, women like Betty Friedan, who were concerned mostly with the plight of white, college-educated housewives. Yet there are no interviews with either Steinem or other movement veterans that reflect explicitly on the relationship between feminism and civil rights. We hear about how Steinem’s sexy good looks helped propel her to prominence, but not about how her whiteness helped make feminism seem less threatening. We also learn nothing about the sophisticated set of critiques women-of-color, such as Angela Davis and bell hooks, have long made regarding mainstream feminism: that its focus on abortion detracted from their own struggle for maternal rights and that the assumption that women represent a united interest group often downplayed the struggles of non-white women in overcoming racism.

The reason why I called this doc “precise” is because I didn’t expect it to be nothing more and nothing less than a reflection of the mainstream Second Wave feminist movement…which was, in reality, notoriously short on analysis of race and racism as it functioned within it. When it was addressed, the rhetoric talked about white men and their race vis-à-vis “male privilege.” Some of the white women within that movement may have deeply empathized with and felt themselves in solidarity with the struggles of people of color—Steinem presents herself as such a person—but, as cravenly cynical as it seems, those struggles were also a media-friendly “hook” so people could grasp why women were fighting for, say, equal pay and the right to safe abortion. And, as critiqued again and again, loaded with white female privilege.

For Second Wave mainstream feminism, the mere presence of women of color showed how “diverse” women can come together to fight for the “common” goal of equal rights for “women.” That was “race talk” enough to show the movement’s good faith regarding this.  When it came time to really deal with how race, racism, and white female privilege infused mainstream feminism, the usual response was variations of, “We’re all sisters here. Talking about race divides the movement!” Out of that frustration of failing to address the issue came the influential works like The Combahee River Collective; Pat Parker’s Movement in Black; Gloria Hull’s, Patricia Bell Scott’s and Barbara Smith’s All the Women Are White, All the Black Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave; Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: An Anthology; Gloria Anzaldua’s and Cherrie Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back; Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider; Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens; and Anzaldua’s La Frontera/Borderlands.  (And, as some hip-hop and other feminists would tell you, some Second Wavers still hold that viewpoint.)

These and other books by and about women of color that came out of the that time period were viewed as writings of outliers, not really touching the mainstream rhetoric or the “concerns” of that movement, which is reflected  in the doc by omission. The writing of Angela Davis, which Dana Goldstein mentioned, helped shape the Third Wave of feminism. Though Angela Davis was in the same demographic as Steinem—both are Baby Boomers–during the throes of the Second Wave (in the 60s through the 70s), Davis was speaking about Black Power. Though her autobiography shows a consciousness around feminism and intersectionality, it was later in her public intellectual life that Davis became famous in feminist imaginations—and required college reading–with her classic books Women, Race, and Class and Women, Culture, and Politics.

It’s the same thing, really, with bell hooks.  Though she was critiquing the Second Wave hard, she was an outlier as far as the mainstream Second Wave was concerned.  hooks was 19-year-old undergrad when she wrote Ain’t I a Woman in the 70s and had it published a decade later—long after the mainstream Second Wave, with Steinem’s help, formed its rhetoric and platform of “equal rights” and became part of the academy.

That’s why I’m not surprised that the film didn’t include these foremothers of the Third Wave or pay attention to, let alone analyze, the issue of race and racism.  This doc isn’t that doc about the race/racism/feminism conundrum.  In that sense, I can, strangely enough, somewhat forgive Gloria for not addressing that issue. That almost insta-kyriarchal critique we in anti-racist and some other progressive circles do and are used to isn’t Steinem. This doc is, simply put, a longer periscope of the mainstream Second Wave through Steinem’s view.

And the way Steinem and her feminist compatriots have seen it is that all women were “women.” There wasn’t a whole lot of difference, as Steinem and some others in the mainstream Second Wave framed it, between the issues that a woman of color had and a white woman. And, probably coming from a working-class background as Steinem was , she probably felt she was in solidarity because her white femaleness was mitigated privilege where white women from that socio-economic group were (and are still) viewed as “trashy.”

However, as much as the film did not address race and racism in the mainstream Second Wave and how Steinem may have shaped that conversation, I do think Steinem herself did shift her ideas about race and feminism–and the film didn’t reflect that, either. That moment came when she was publicly called out by Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry on Democracy Now! for her New York Times op-ed challenging then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s qualifications to lead the country (transcript here):

Steinem, as per the Second Wave rhetoric, starts to say that “women struggle as women.” Dr. Harris-Perry checks that—she, who has not only the lived experience as a woman of color in the US, but more than likely studied the writings of hooks, Davis, Anzaldua, Walker, Smith, Hull, Moraga, and many other feminists of color.

I think the best example of Steinem’s post-debate shift is what I saw at the screening of the doc last Thursday. A friend of mine, Loop 21’s Keli Goff, asked Steinem about her thoughts on the anti-Black anti-choice billboards and how activists should move forward against future ones. Steinem responded by asking Goff if she heard about the activism that happened in NYC. Goff said no. That’s when another friend of mine, SisterSong NYC’s Jasmine Burnett raised her hand and got Steinem’s attention. All Steinem said to the audience was, “This is what we call networking.” Burnett got up and spoke very eloquently to Goff and the group on how a cohort organization, Trust Black Women, and SisterSong NYC helped galvanize people to take down the sign, the feelings of the pro-choice mom whose daughter’s photo was on those billboards, and the current situation with the ads.  The only other thing Steinem did was ask Burnett to mention SisterSong’s Loretta Ross. Other than that, Steinem fell back for Burnett: an older white feminist—an icon at that!—stepped aside for a younger feminist of color. And Steinem looked rather content in that role. I suspect that, if that call-out didn’t happen, Steinem would have interrupted Burnett and attempt to talk about the signs affecting “all women” and said and done other off-putting things.

Gloria: In Her Own Words is, if not a form of haigiography, a “legacy film”: Steinem is getting her bequethal in order for those people who may never pick her books or will wade through 60+ years of documentation about the second wave. With that understanding, I enjoyed the film: I understood her a little better. She, like me, came from Toledo, OH; she took care of her mom, who suffered a nervous breakdown; she suffered the loss of her dad, who she didn’t see transition due to being on the road for feminism; she married late in life and became a widow a short time after she married. Those details humanize Steinem when people are so used to discussing her as a controversial figure or icon to love or hate or debate about. The doc is a good summation of one person’s wide-ranging and deeply influential life.

As for the future of feminism, this is Steinem’s benediction: “Don’t listen to me, but listen to your own hearts about what’s best for feminism.” And, if it’s in our hearts to make that film about race, racism, and feminism, then I think Steinem would fall back about it.

Image credits:  Ms. Magazine and missomnimedia

There have been thousands of words written about Stockett’s skills, her portrayal of the black women versus the white women, her right to tell this story at all. I won’t rehash those arguments, except to say that I found the novel fast-paced but highly problematic. Even more troubling, though, is how the structure of narratives like The Help underscores the failure of pop culture to acknowledge a central truth: Within the civil rights movement, white people were the help.

The architects, visionaries, prime movers, and most of the on-the-ground laborers of the civil rights movement were African-American. Many white Americans stood beside them, and some even died beside them, but it was not their fight — and more important, it was not their idea.

This isn’t the first time the civil rights movement has been framed this way fictionally, especially on film. Most Hollywood civil rights movies feature white characters in central, sometimes nearly solo, roles. My favorite (not!) is Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, which gives us two white FBI agents as heroes of the movement. FBI agents! Given that J. Edgar Hoover did everything short of shoot Martin Luther King Jr. himself in order to damage or discredit the movement, that goes from troubling to appalling.

Why is it ever thus? Suffice it to say that these stories are more likely to get the green light and to have more popular appeal (and often acclaim) if they have white characters up front. That’s a shame. The continued impulse to reduce the black women and men of the civil rights movement to bit players in the most extraordinary step toward justice that this nation has ever known is infuriating, to say the least. Minny and Aibileen are heroines, but they didn’t need Skeeter to guide them to the light. They fought their way out of the darkness on their own — and they brought the nation with them.

–Martha Southgate, The Truth about the Civil Rights Era

The first is a short video. Directed and narrated by Irish, Anishinaabe, Metis writer Beth Aileen Lameman and edited by Beaver Lake Cree filmmaker Myron Lameman, the video looks at really common stereotypes being deployed in game narratives. Lameman points to the common framings of “cowboys vs. indians,” guides, and “wise old Indians” and heavy doses of the white savior narrative and the “half-breed hero” trope.

The second is an essay over at Project COE that tackles the politics behind representation:

“How many kids will play this game and then carry what they’ve experienced into their interactions with real, live Apaches and other Native Americans?” the Association for American Indian Development asked video game publishing giant Activision in a public letter accusing the company’s 2006 PC and console title GUN of containing “some very disturbing racist and genocidal elements toward Native Americans”. The AAID went on to launch an online petition demanding that Activision “remove all derogatory, harmful, and inaccurate depictions of American Indians” from the game and reissue a more culturally sensitive version, threatening to campaign to have the game pulled from store shelves internationally. Although Activision thereafter issued an apology to anyone who may have been offended by the game, they justified the content of their product by pointing out that such depictions had already been “conveyed not only through video games but through films, television programming, books, and other media”. The AAID’s subsequent attempts to have the game recalled were barely acknowledged.

As evident in Activision’s defense of GUN, many negative stereotypes about Native American culture are so ingrained in mainstream media that the near-genocide of an entire culture is rarely treated with the same sensitivity with which we regard similarly tragic occurrences like the Holocaust, or African American slavery. The AAID argues that video games like GUN undermine the severity of the atrocities committed against First Nations tribes by the European settlers and marginalize this violence in a way that negatively affects the image of contemporary Native Americans. Millions of people play video games, and entertainment can leave long-lasting impressions on consumers, making it important to be able to criticize misconceptions and separate fantasy from reality. The impact of media on our mentality towards people and events certainly cannot be underestimated, so it is understandable that an organization such as the AAID should be concerned about what kind of images audiences are exposed to, but were their claims about GUN‘s potentially damaging effects warranted?

On Thursday, June 9, I attended a Gen-Art sponsored screening of Victoria Mahoney’s independent feature Yelling to the Sky in Manhattan. Starring Zöe Kravitz and co-starring Gabourey Sidibe, this film has had significant buzz. It made its debut at the Berlin Film Festival and was workshopped via Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters and Directors Lab. Based on synopses I read prior to the screening, I was curious to see if the portrayal of black women(hood) would be complex and fresh (as it was in Ava Duvernay’s wonderful I Will Follow) or if it would stick to the usual, shopworn portrayals that sometimes plague even independent feature films. I was especially interested to see whether Sidibe’s character would be similar to the one she played in Precious or if that image would be turned inside out (Sidibe was actually cast as Latonya Williams in Yelling before being slated to play Precious Jones).

In Yelling, Kravitz plays Sweetness O’Hara, a biracial high school student coming of age in New York City while managing a difficult home life. Quiet (at least for the first part of the film), sensitive, introspective, and intelligent, Sweetness has to contend with an alcoholic father, a mother with emotional (and possibly mental) issues, an older sister coping with young motherhood, bullies at school, and urban poverty. Zöe Kravitz did a great job with the script she was given; her performance was nuanced and quite believable. Actually, most of the actors in the movie were strong (including Tariq Trotter, better known as Black Thought of The Roots). However, despite the actors’ efforts, they could not overcome the disjointed storytelling nor the director’s inability to avoid well-worn tropes of the “coming of age in the ‘hood” drama. And whether intentionally or not, the director played into common cinematic (and real-life) racial memes. There were four that stood out.

Dark(er)-skinned black people are mean and like to victimize light(er)-skinned black people. The opening scene of Yelling involves Sweetness, accompanied by a friend of similar complexion, riding her bicycle right into a group of kids from her high school who in short order take her bike and beat her down in the street. Gabourey Sidibe’s character Latonya is the ringleader of this group, initiating the bullying and fighting, and ultimately ordering her boyfriend to viciously finish the job. The assault only stops when Sweetness’ sister Ola, who like Sweetness is very fair, brutally assaults her sister’s male attacker. While the director may not have intended for this scene to evoke intraracial stereotypes and conflict about skin color, it certainly looked that way on screen. Also, while Sidibe’s character was well put together (her hair was laid and her makeup was popping), she was still an (physically) intimidating bully.

Girls/teenagers/women who are “authentically” black are bad. They fight, party, don’t care about achieving anything in life, and use illicit substances. After yet another incidence of family trauma, Sweetness reinvents herself. She starts selling drugs, begins cutting class, seemingly abandons her aspiration to attend college, and gets a makeover courtesy of two of the (darker-skinned) girls who were involved in her initial beat down. Her new look involves rocking doorknocker earrings, sashaying down neighborhood streets and school hallways in tight jeans, putting on lots of eye shadow and lip gloss, and a wearing a cornrow on the right side of her hair. She also enacts revenge upon Latonya, again with assistance from her two new friends, beating her bloody between classes. Near the end of the movie when it seems that Sweetness in trying to return to her old ways of being, she distances herself from her friends, apologizes to Latonya for beating her up, and pleads with her school’s guidance counselor to get her into any college that will accept her. Sweetness’ trajectory is not uncommon to young people of all races and ethnicities, especially when dealing with challenging life circumstances. But in this particular film, her journey to and return from darkness are literally marked by her association with and ultimate dissociation from those who are dark (of skin).

Dark(er)-skinned black male patriarchs mean well even when they’re doing bad, and they always abandon their kids in the end. When Sweetness wants to get into the drug game to supplement her family’s meager (non-existent?) income, she seeks out Roland (Black Thought’s character). He’s an educated hoodlum…you know, the black man that would be a CEO, were it not for America’s racist brand of capitalism. Roland resists Sweetness’ initial requests for him to put her on. But after being worn down by her relentless requests, he acquiesces and becomes her mentor and supplier. His daddy-figure drug dealer status is cemented when he also rejects Kravitz’s character’s romantic advances after a night of partying. Contrasted with the stoner sellers that Sweetness sometimes works alongside in her school’s stairwells, Roland’s selling of illicit substances seems almost righteous. In that way, he’s not dissimilar from other sympathetic drug slingers like Ice Cube’s Doughboy (Boyz ‘N The Hood) and Chris Tucker’s affable Smokey of Friday fame. But in the end, Roland puts Sweetness in harms way when he brings her to a drug pick-up that goes wrong. He ultimately ends up bleeding on a neighborhood basketball court after getting shot in retribution for the deal gone bad. Sweetness witnesses his murder after playing ball with him minutes earlier. But it’s not surprising. Black men always end up leaving their children to fend for themselves.

Interracial relationships are dysfunctional and make everyone involved unhappy. Sweetness and Ola have a white, alcoholic father and a black, emotionally impaired mother. Their mother seems shell-shocked and is actually missing-with little explanation-throughout most of the movie. Earlier in the film, it seems that she literally abandons her children, but later it’s hinted that she was in a mental institution. The father physically assaults everyone in the house at least once during the film and regularly metes out verbal punishment. Near the end of the film, again with little in the way of explanation, Sweetness’ father decides to actually attempt to parent her. He tries to keep her off the streets and pull her off the dark path she’s started to follow, becoming her savior. The O’Hara’s family dynamic embodies three classic celluloid tropes: black mothers are bad and/or incompetent, white people/men are the ones who save the day, and (female) children who are the products of interracial relationships have tragic lives.

Zöe Kravitz as Sweetness, good girl gone bad.

Though I enjoyed the visual quality of this film and at times, the lyrical storytelling, I felt that Victoria Mahoney tread well-traveled ground. Yelling to the Sky seemed to me a mash-up of Kids, Larry Clark’s tale of urban teenage nihilism, and Proenza-Schouler’s controversial Act Da Fool; visually captivating, emotionally brutal, and unstereotypical in its presentation of stereotypes of black/biracial women and urban blackness.

While Mahoney is black and/or a woman of color (she was profiled in the April 2011 issue of Essence in an article about black independent filmmakers, “Independent Women”), that does not mean that she is incapable of promoting prosaic images of black women and people. I was unable to unearth much about Mahoney’s background, except that she worked as an actress, then moved into directing/writing/producing. I have no idea what her experience as a non-white woman has been. However, whether or not she meant to make statements about race, the images she has put forth still speak to some “truths” held by her and/or a society steeped in white supremacy. As bell hooks said in Outlaw Culture, “Whether we like it or not, cinema assumes a pedagogical role in the lives of many people. It may not be the intent of the filmmaker to teach audiences anything, but that does not mean that lessons are not learned.”

Gaps between white experiences and non-white experiences pop up in the strangest places.

Raven-Symoné has a new comedy on ABC Family called State of Georgia. This is her first comedy series where she will be playing an adult role and it’s been interesting watching that transition. I had planned to tune into the premiere, but it moved up in priority when I read the producer, Jennifer Weiner, talking about Raven’s weight loss in USA Today:

Q: Tell us about the show’s star, Raven-Symoné, who plays Georgia.

A: What we were looking for was a larger-than-life, bubbly, exuberant, confident young woman who was convinced of her own worth even when the world couldn’t see it. I really think that’s what we have with Raven. She’s this incredibly natural comedienne.

Q: Is Georgia a classic Jennifer Weiner character?

A: The original intention was for Georgia to be a big, curvy girl, and that would be one of the obstacles she dealt with while pursuing her acting career. She wanted to play the ingénue and the bombshell, and people would want to cast her as the funny best friend. Raven has lost a lot of weight, and that’s been a challenge we’ve been dealing with. But in terms of her sense of humor and outlook on life, Georgia’s going to feel familiar to anyone who loved Canny in Good in Bed or Becky in Little Earthquakes and Addy in Best Friends Forever.

…

Okay. I’m very familiar with Weiner’s work, having read most of it, and I get it – Weiner writes curvy heroines. She is most comfortable writing about larger women trying to make their way in the world. And there have been a great many discussions (like this one from Women and Hollywood) on the debates around Raven-Symoné’s weight loss and how it impacted what they were doing for the show.

But I’m puzzled. Did no one ever point out that black, thin and thick actresses face that same problem in terms of always being cast as the funny best friend? Come on, now, it’s even got a TV Tropes entry. The same jokes wouldn’t fly, but I am sure there are plenty of women who could help the writing team come up with amazing bits about how screwed up the acting world is to women of color. They could call Angela Nissel and Aisha Tyler in for writing assistance, and ask for people like Gabrielle Union and all of the women on this list to provide real life anecdotes for the show.

Or is that just too scary of a topic?

A good rumor is like a wild forest fire. It comes and goes mostly on its own grand will and terrorizes most in its presence, firefighters and rumormongers alike. The frenzy of speculation around Tyler Perry’s stated or implied sexuality is such a rumor, a sea of loud crackles and hazardous smoke, so forgive me for keeping my distance. Fire burns. This statement is about something different, albeit adjacent. After a viewing of Perry’s “Why Did I get Married, Too?” one cannot help but be struck by its somewhat blatant and unchecked homophobic moments. From “boys-being-boys” to boys in drag jumping out of cakes for no apparent reason the film strikes a discordant chord in some instances of comedy that mostly comes across as coded homophobia.

A good critique should always come with a healthy dose of confession, so here are a few to color your reading. My perspective is one of a black man in search of true love. “That all-consuming, can’t-live-without you love,” (forgive the borrowed phrase dear Carrie Bradshaw.) The kind of marriage I seek is expressly banned in about forty-one states in this great union of ours, and New York just barely legalized it. So aside from being an idealist I am also a bit of a fantasist. Suffice it to say that when I look at depictions of love, Black love in particular, I seek mirrors of myself by habit. Tyler Perry is the main focus here only because he has the biggest mirror – one that if it is not going to pay me any compliments should at least not distort my reflection. That’s all I’m saying.

With two movies in this vein under his belt, a look inside the contemporary Black marriage one might say, Perry has succeeded in saying absolutely nothing about Black gay marriage. Much has been explored when it comes to the committed heterosexual Black relationship; the physical cheating, the emotional cheating, the wanting the baby, the not wanting the baby, the death of the baby, the emotional and physical abuse, etc. And beyond the pathology one manages to glimpse quite a few moments of bliss; which is what keeps me coming back to the franchise maybe. The love portrayed for example between Louis Gossett Jr. and Cicely Tyson in the sequel is moving. And in all that exploration there is not a mention of girls who marry each other, or boys who are committed to one other, and how wonderful that might be. Not a sentence. Now this is of course expected, as it is status quo. If the president is allowed to have a constantly “evolving” perspective on the “issue.” Well, we can all also pretend it’s nothing to speak up about, I guess.

So beyond being a martyr for the cause the least one could expect from Perry would be not to put down being gay, right? Well, here come the spoilers.

Our sequel journey starts on a vacation retreat to the Bahamas with our four married couples and things turn a bit South when fifth wheel and wife beating ex-husband Mike (Richard T. Jones) shows up. Angela (Tasha Smith) is of course in his face right away and her closing insult to him is “you are such a queen.” Apropos of nothing. Implication? Only a queen would stroll into a nice healthy “couples” retreat to ruin it. Now the argument here, the reason her friends don’t say “c’mon girl you throwing stones,” is that it is just accepted that Black folk are homophobic behind closed doors. Heck, the first people blamed right after the California Prop 8 fiasco was “churchy” Black folk. Forget that some reporting, like David Kaufman’s for The Root in March of this year reveals the issue to be more complex:

“But the truth is actually reversed. Focused far more on job creation, health care and education than on gay marriage, black voters aren’t supporting conservative candidates simply because they oppose LGBT rights. Instead, they are voting for progressive pro-LGBT candidates — despite disagreeing with their pro-LGBT platforms.”

So it is convenient, maybe funny, to think that there are all these Black church folk dismissing gayness all the time but it’s just not true. At a recent screening in Harlem, I watched a crowd of mostly Black people interact positively with the idea of marriage equality after screening independent filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris’ short on Byron Rushing, the Black heterosexual Massachusetts state representative who took it upon himself to fight for marriage equality in his state. Most of the faces in support of Rushing’s cause were not White.

Our second brief moment of homophobia in Perry’s sequel makes an appearance on the boat in the Bahamas while the boys are hanging out and fishing. Mike has just admitted he misses his ex-wife Sheila (Jill Scott) and is crashing the Bahamas couples retreat to try and get her back. When Mike is less than receptive to his friends’ jabs, aka “Sheila don’t want you no more,” Gavin (Malik Yoba) teases Mike for being “Sensateeve”. Also known as the international black gay version of the word “sensitive.” Black men are never supposed to be seen as sensitive of course, let alone “sensateeve.” It is interesting that both these moments center on a character portrayed as essentially “the problem” in an otherwise ideal marriage. There’s an exploitation of a broad stereotype in there somewhere keep digging. The most pronounced moment of homophobia is given to us toward the end of the film when Pat (Janet Jackson) finally confronts her soon to be ex-husband who has been arguably extorting her for money she earned as a successful author. Pat steps into the room with some fierce black and white heels, a black fitted pantsuit, and a slim tie. Suggesting of course masculinity, and with it, power.

She ushers in a giant cake that is rolled in as her husband uncomfortably watches his employees sing him “Happy Birthday” on his wife’s request. After several previous scenes of marriage decay between the two we are still not quite sure why things are over, only that he says she no longer loves him, and maybe she thinks he’s immature. After the “birthday” serenade is over Pat gives the order and a skinny black man, dressed in glittery skin tight spandex, and a loud lollipop colored wig emerges from the cake working it better than Marilyn Monroe might have. Here Pat accuses Gavin for being a “bitch” by trying to steal money he did not earn, and one assumes the “bitch” in this metaphor just popped out of the cake. One has to assume this, otherwise why the show?As Gavin walks away Pat follows repeating her accusations and threatening to fight for what is hers. The moment is supposed to call to mind Angela Bassett burning her cheating husband’s clothes in “Waiting to Exhale” maybe, it is supposed to be a victory. For the most part it falls flat, it climaxes unexpectedly and we end up in the hospital (lawd), but mostly it is unsuccessful because the entire time you’re wondering why a skinny flamboyant guy wearing what can only be described as “Ompaloompa Chic” just jumped out of a cake, and what that has to do with a crumbling marriage. Is she trying to tell him his homophobia ruined their marriage? Nah, I think she’s just trying to tell him he’s a “bitch.” You know, “punk,” “sissy,” “fag.” Sigh. So take all this as you may. I may be reading way too much into it. I may be watching way too many Tyler Perry movies just to complain about them. But the picture I get here is this: black marriage is hard, black marriage is not for punks, or bitches. And if your Black marriage is falling apart, first check to see that you’re not married to one of them, they kill marriages.

Or maybe I’m just being a little Sensateeve.

If someone did a study of the subject matter of prime time television shows, I guarantee that the crime drama would come out on top. If young people of color are, as the study suggests, disproportionately watching television over dinner, they are probably watching a crime show. In shows about crime, courts, and the law- I wonder what races most of the criminals are? I wonder how it impacts children to watch police be the hero over and over again? I wonder… alas, I have seen no such recent study, so I can only speak from my experience. I am a “crime time” junkie, and I see are Black and Latinos over-represented as criminals in this so-called “post-racial” environment. Also, most crime dramas are rendered from the perspective of the police, narrowing the frame further. The over-arching message is that over-incarceration is the result of crime not inequity, and that crime is a fact of life that requires the brutal intervention of well-meaning police.

But TV isn’t the only problem. According to the study, young people of color spend more time than white kids listening to music too. Given the corporate takeover of the music industry over the last 30 years, the messages of crime time dramas are echoed in mainstream hip hop. Add to that the decline of journalism in general, and specifically the elimination of news on music stations resulting from the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and the inference is clear.

Young people of color are bombarded with images of their inhumanity, denied basic access to information, and excluded from the educational opportunity computer and Internet access brings. I think this lowers self esteem and raises their tolerance for inhuman conditions. But we also have power. Did you know that “ethnic consumers” (what telecommunications companies call people of color who buy their products) are the major buying power in the telecom market? By 2009, 1 out of every 3 dollars spent on telecommunications services came from U.S. “ethnic” communities. It’s up to us all, not just the few media justice groups among us- to fight back.

- From the Center for Media Justice, June 15

I had a great Twitter conversation yesterday with @AndreaPlaid, @AnnaHolmes and @Amaditalks. We were talking about Julie Klausner’s recent post on Jezebel, “Don’t fear the dowager: a valentine to maturity.” Klausner’s post, lamenting the trend of grown women adopting childish personas, is sort of a companion to all the similar pieces about modern men living in a state of perpetual boyhood. She writes:

There’s so much ukulele playing now, it’s deafening. So much cotton candy, so many bunny rabbits and whoopie pies and craft fairs and kitten emphera, and grown women wearing converse sneakers with mini skirts. So many fucking birds.

Girls get tattoos that they will never be able to grow into. Women with master’s degrees who are searching for life partners, list “rainbows, Girl Scout cookies, and laughing a lot” under “interests, on their Match.com profiles. Read more…

The Klausner article generated a ton of push back on Jezebel. I suspect because the manic pixie dream girl persona is “in” right now and everyone wants to feel like they choose their own choices. In this case, that means that some women want to believe that their predilection for rompers and kittens and baby voices reflects their individual personalities and not some trend toward retro, non-threatening femaleness. But no one chooses their choices in a vacuum and certainly it means something that so many women seem to be finding this super-girlish, childish part of their personalities at the same time, while Katy Perry’s sex and candy persona is tearing up the charts and actual little girls are being bombarded with pink, purple, princesses, tulle and sparkles.

Zooey Deschanel is the poster girl for this sort of womanhood. Frankly, I find a 30-something woman with a website called Hello Giggles and a penchant for tweets about kittens a little off-putting, as I would a grown man with a website called Girls Have Cooties and a Twitter feed about Matchbox cars. But then we find creepy in a man the kind of childishness we fetishize in women.

I also find it worth noting that the persona that Klausner writes about is bound by class and race. The cult of domesticity defined idealized womanhood centuries ago–and that definition included both perpetual childhood and whiteness. The wide-eyed, girlish, take-care-of-me characters that Deschanel inhabits on film are not open to many women of color, particularly black women. We can be strong women, aggressive women, promiscuous women…we can do Bonet bohemian and Earth Mother (as Andrea pointed out), but never carefree and childish. Even black girls are too often viewed as worldly women and not innocents.

Also, the affectations of the manic pixie are read differently on black women. A streak of pink in the hair goes from quirky and youthful to “ghetto” on a black body. Thrift store clothing leads to a host of class assumptions.

Am I wrong about this? Is there a black Zooey? A manic pixie Latina? Is this a persona that women of color can inhabit?

Photo and image credits: What Tami Said

**TRIGGER WARNING**

I recognize the women in this preview: these women were me when I was growing up. The kids at my mostly black Catholic school called me just about every black-related perjorative ever since 3rd grade, letting me know and telling others within my earshot that I was physically inferior solely because I was dark-skinned. I even remember a boy in my 7th grade class drew a picture of me being nothing more than a solid black square. Even though the same kids voted me 8th grade class president…I was still considered in their estimation an ugly (vis-a-vis my skin tone) girl. Even had the only boy who was my boyfriend (we were in 8th grade) dump me for a lighter-skinned and younger girl, to the mocking laughter of the lighter-skinned students.

My mom—a dark-skinned African American herself—told me something that didn’t make any sense through my woundedness: “You know those light-skinned girls people think are pretty in school? Wait ‘til you’re grown and see where you’re at and where they’re at.” Added to this was my mom’s constant admonition to “get an education.” Well, sure enough, what my mom said came to pass. I’ve had photographers approach me and ask to photograph me. I had lovers of various hues—even had a husband. (He was white.) And women of various hues, races, and ethnicities have given me love on the streets, at the job, and at workshops.

I’m not sure how—or even if—some of the women in the clip worked through the pain some black people have inflicted on them. But, instead of the usual devolving, derailing, and erasing conversations of “that’s happened to me, too, though I’m a lighter-skinned black person!” (that’s a thread for another post) or “it wasn’t me! I’m a down black person!” (will be met with an exasperated eyeroll)…it would be a really good thing to simply listen to these women’s truths, as uncomfortable–sometimes, as implicating–as they may be.

Transcript after the jump.

Dark Girls: Preview from Bradinn French on Vimeo.

Voiceover: Rise, dark girls.

Interviewee #1: I can remember being in the bathtub, asking my mom to put bleach in the water so that my skin could be lighter. And so that I can escape the feeling that I had about not being as beautiful, being as acceptable, as lovable.

Interviewee #2: If we’re all just hanging out and a dark-skinned girl walked by, [some would say], “oh, she’s pretty for a dark-skinned girl.” And I’m like, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Interviewee #3: I’d used to wish that I would wake up one day lighter or would wash my face and think that it would change. I thought it was dirt and would try to clean it off but it wouldn’t.

Interviewee #4: Just doing something small as standing in front of class to do show-n-tell, I wouldn’t look up or make eye contact with anyone. I would hold my doll really tight because I knew my toy loved me even if they didn’t.

Interviewee #5: “Here comes Blackie”…”here comes Tar Baby”…I remember one in particular: they’d say, “You stayed in the oven too long.” And that was really hurtful.

Interviewee #6: And they would do it every single day without let-up: on the playground, in the classroom, in the cafeteria. Constantly you got it, so I really didn’t have a high self-esteem.

Interviewee #7: It was so damaging. It made us feel like we were unwanted, that we were less than…

Interviewee #8: My mother and her friend, we were driving somewhere. And she bragging on me: “My daughter is beautiful. She’s got great eyeleashes; she’s got the cheekbones; she’s got great lips.” And she’s going on, and she adds,”Can you imagine if she had any lightness in her skin at all? She’d be gorgeous!” And just that last little part…all that pride I had about, you know, her bragging on me, just dissipated. Just dissipated. And I think that that moment I really became aware.”

Questioner: Show me the smart child. Why is she the smart child?

Child: Because she’s white.

Questioner: OK. Show me the dumb child. And why is she the dumb child?

Child: Because she’s black.

Questioner: Show me the ugly child. And why is she the ugly child?

Child: Because she’s black.

Questioner: Show me the good-looking child. Why is she good-looking?

Child: Because she’s light-skinned.

Interviewee #9: I think I remember most saying, you know, if I have a little girl, I just…I didn’t want her to be dark.

(Chokes back tears)

I remember saying that. I didn’t want her to be dark like me.

Interviewee #1: When you’re around so many people that you trust, you know, just because you’re looking at another black person, and you’re thinking, “I’m black, you’re black. They’re not going to have anything derogatory to say about me.” But when you live so many years with people having certain judgments relative to your skin tone, you start to believe it.

Interviewee #10: A friend of mine had a baby. It was my first time seeing the baby. The baby was beautiful. [The friend ] said, “Gurl, I’m so glad she didn’t come out dark!” and when she said it, it felt like a dagger, like someone took a dagger and stuck it in my heart because I was used to expecting hearing things like that from other races. But this was someone I considered to be my sister.

Interviewee #11: Skin color amongst the black community is a huge issue in our time

Voiceover: This is not a phenomenon, It’s just the reality in the black culture.

Interviewee #12: I believe we didn’t like ourselves. Sure, it started in slavery, but we kept the vicious cycle going.

Man on the street: I mean, you know, dark-skinned women…I really don’t like dark-skinned women. They look funny beside me. So, you know, I’d rather not date a dark-skinned woman.

Off-camera interviewer: You’d rather [date] a light-skinned girl?

Man on the Street: Yeah. Light-skinned pretty girl. Long hair.

Interviewee #10: My experience with Black men is I’m exotic, I’m beautiful…they’re fascinated by me—behind closed doors. But when it came to dating, coming to the front door and taking me out in public? Doesn’t happen.

Interviewee #1: The darker you are, it’s more of a sexual approach. It’s more of a relationship-without-much-meaning sort of approach more than I-could-get-married-to-that-woman-and-have-a-few-kids.

Interviewee #7: All my lighter friends had those boyfriends. They were always seen together. But if someone wanted to date me, it was “I’ll meet you after school.” It was more of a hidden thing. Nobody ever just wanted to be with you.

Intervierwee #5: There’ve been places I’ve gone that there are just a lot of whites, and they would tell me, “You have such beautiful skin! Is that your hair? Did you dye it? Is that your natural hair?” It’s really questionable to me that they think I’m so beautiful and my own people don’t see any beauty in me at all?

Interviewee #13: I was once on CNN, debating the whole controversy about Beyonce ‘s L’Oreal ad. When a picture of her in motion was placed against a picture of her in print, everyone said there’s no way that they didn’t lighten her skin. And I don’t want to believe that that’s still happening in this day and age.

Man #1: And she’s got that good hair, too.

Man #2: You like what?

Man #1: I like girls with that light complexion.

Man #2: You’re a moron.

Man #1: I can’t help it.

Man #2: What? Being a moron?

Man #1: Yeah, that too.

Interviewee #14: Several years ago, I had decided I wanted to, umm, wear a ‘fro. I remember one young lady said to me if she ever had hair look like that, she’s had to cover it. I said to her, “Well, if you take the perm out of your hair, that’s exactly what it looks like.” And she said she’s never seen her natural hair because, from when she was small, her momma had always put something in it.

Young woman: It doesn’t look clean, I feel like. It looks, like, nasty almost. If you just roll out of bed and your hair is nappy, it’s, like, the most disgusting, most unclean thing.

Interviewee #11: I’ve had issues with having longer hair since a small child. And it did come from black kids.

Interviewee #1: Being in school, there was just such a separation among girls who were lighter-skinned and girls who were darker-skinned

Interviewee #15: It was really bad in junior high school. With Nair, I knew people who threw bowls of it in their hair just to take it. So, yeah, we were separated, and it caused a lot of friction among children. Which now, as an adult, just seems stupid to me.

Interviewee #16: The racism we have as a people, among ourselves, is a direct backlash of slavery. The “house niggers” versus the “field niggers.” The paper-bag rule: if you’re darker than a paper bag, the whole thing. We as a people were so disenfranchised that we adopted some of that. A lot of that.

Interviewee #17: I think the problems within the black community has to do more with our lack of unity. We really don’t see each other as being part of the community, partly because we don’t have a language or have something tangible besides our skin color to say, “I am a part of you. You are a part of me.” In the black community it’s, “No, I’m not black! I’m Caribbean,” or ‘No! I’m not black! I’m Haitian.” No, you’re black.

Interviewee #9: Rise, dark girls. Rise.

(Music)

Yes, these women in the clip remind me of myself, where I could have gone mentally (emotionally, spiritually, etc.) if I didn’t have the mom I have. Watching this clip made me want to loan my mom to each and every one of them so they could hear her intervening message and wipe their tears. Moms may even update her advice: “And I’m going to tell you what I just told my own daughter: look at the First Lady and tell me that a dark-skinned woman is unattractive and unloveable.” I may even send Moms over to the house of Interviewee #8’s mom to verbally whup her ass.

At the same time, as I told sex blogger/filmmaker Arielle Loren in our Facebook conversation about the preview, I feel a bit skeeved by the clip. Even though the conversation about shadeism and its particular effects on darker-hued black women is needed, it also plays on the “pitiful, unloveable dusky Negress” trope that can be emotionally exploitive for the participants and for the viewers…and seems to be a new spin on the “unattractive and unmarriable black woman” trope that’s been on the uptick for a minute. As Arielle said in the thread, “While I don’t want to shake the finger at something “positive,” if the director still is in the editing process…It’s important to also show dark girls who were empowered and managed to build strong self-esteem despite the overwhelming negative opinions of our community and society at large.” I responded, “ But what you’re saying makes me wonder if 1) the doc makers (Bill Duke and D. Channsin Berry) even interviewed anyone with an “empowered” perspective or 2) when this clip was edited for the ‘ad campaign’ the thought was ‘let’s use the trope of the ‘unloveable, pitiable dusky Negress’ to get the buzz going and, eventually, to get people to watch it.”

But again, this is a preview. According to the Vimeo page, the film won’t be released until Fall or Winter 2011. I think this film is participating in a conversation that’s so necessary—if, for no one else, for the women in the documentary and for quite a few darker-skinned black women carrying and maybe destructively acting from this wound. But, as we say in these parts, Black people—and that definitely includes Black women—aren’t a monolith. So, I hope this film presents more sides to this issue, more and varied voices of dark-skinned black women to speak about this hurtful issue. And that this clip will be re-edited to reflect those women’s experiences.

If need be, I’ll happily volunteer my mom and me.

Photo credits: Courtesy of Andrea (AJ) Plaid

Two women, dressed in bikinis, stand on a stage. One woman’s muscles bulge from every part of her body. The other is voluptuous with a perfect hourglass figure and a fat gluteus maximus. The first woman is a bodybuilder, flexing, flaunting, and celebrating her body for an audience. The second woman is a video vixen, also parading and celebrating her body. Similar in wardrobe and performance, these women’s bodies are the center of their careers. Yet, the commoditization of black female bodies remains a controversial topic. While the video vixen would receive the cast of shame for promoting her figure for profit, the bodybuilder gets a clean pass for doing the same, simply because she’s in the fitness industry. It’s the same for high fashion models using their figures for profit. Why do certain women receive callous judgment for pursuing careers centered on their bodies?

While it may surprise most, video vixens also train to stay in shape and preserve their hourglass figures. Of course, some indulge in plastic surgery, as do bodybuilders, but regardless, it takes effort to maintain a video vixen’s body. These women also flaunt and entertain for a living on stages and in front of cameras. However, this work is met with extreme disdain because of the politics of respectability that consume the black community. It is not “respectable” to be black, female, voluptuous, and sexy on a stage for profit, but it is perfectly acceptable to be black, female, muscular, and “unsexy.”Is this double standard acceptable? Is one profession truly more sexualized than the other?

–From The Respectability of Video Vixens vs. Body Builders

When we embrace our curvy bodies, we’re told we’re fat. When we accept our thin frames, we’re accused of lazy or bad cooks. We’ve been charged with nursing and caring for  the children of our white employers from Antebellum times through today, but we’re constantly being portrayed as bad mothers. We put a weave in our  hair trying conform to a beauty standard that has nothing to do with us and we’re still called “nappy-headed hoes”. When we go to school, get degrees and a career, we’re “un-marry-able”. If we work and have kids early instead of going to school, same thing happens. When we or others decide to celebrate us, white women scream out “REVERSE RACISM” but we have to comb through 50-11 magazines with white women on every page to find ONE with a Black woman on the cover. We bare it all in a video or keep condoms in our nightstands and we’re called  sluts. We dedicate ourselves to The Church or are decidedly single and we’re prudes or “bitter”. All too often, we are forced to choose our race over our gender or risk feeling the wrath of our Brothers, despite having to live with the realities of both. From Saartjie Baartman aka “Venus Hottentot” to Satoshi Kanazawa’s “scientific” study claiming Black women being less physically attractive than EVERYBODY else, we’ve been studied like freaks of nature instead of just regarded as human beings with the same value as all others.

We’re pretty much damned if we do, damned if we don’t. So, the stereotype of “The Angry Black Woman” is rooted in a very visceral truth. We’re tired of this shyt. Stop telling us to stop getting upset. Stop telling us to not be mad despite having to deal with this crap  ALL THE TIME. Why are we supposed to put up with this reckless disregard for our humanity with a smile on our face? Because we’re women? Because we’re Black? Please, miss me with that bull. We are HUMAN first. This anger is righteous and all ignoring it and the causes of it will do is create a dyspeptic breeding ground for spiritual, psychological, social and physical dis-ease.

–Excerpted from “The Matriarchal Legacy of The Black Woman’s Anger”

Photo Credit: Lynette’s Two Cents

The May 2011 cover girl for ESSENCE magazine this month is none other than one Wendy J. Williams, the woman the Black gossip blogs love to hate and misgender.

Like I’ve said in previous posts on this subject, some of you Black folks need to buy a vowel, pick up a science book and get a clue that transpeople exist in all colors and sizes and aren’t going anywhere.

Note for the ignorantly clueless:  Some of my transsisters are petite size 8 pump wearing fashion divas, so don’t get it twisted..

We are all blends of genetic material and characteristics from mommy and daddy.   A little less testosterone in the womb and some of you so called ‘men‘ attacking Wendy would be rocking her dresses and pumps.

You also need to get a clue that it’s not cool to do what whiteness has done to the images of Black women for centuries and participate in the denigrating of the mothers of humanity. It’s even more repugnant to me as a proud African descended transwomen to see Black people (or alleged online Black people) deliberately misgendering Black women they don’t like.

But some of you are too stupid or insecure about your own gender identity and sexual orientation issues to get that point.

Cue transphobic BS from Bossip in 5…4…3…2…1…

Y’all can hate on Wendy and hurl transphobic slurs at her all you want, she’s got more money in her bank account than you pathetic losers hiding behind your computer terminals misgendering her.

Photo Credit: TransGriot

There comes a time, in every fan’s life, when you know you’re going to just shut up and take the blue pill.

For me, this normally comes up with new fantasy series. I am well aware of the dynamics of the fantasy world, and that most of the best authors generally create worlds in a certain mold: vaguely Middle Ages, super segregated European society archetypes and norms in play. The good are generally white and fair haired, the bad are at least dark haired, if not dark skinned. This is the major basis for most mainstream fantasy series (and even newer genres like urban fantasy follow this mold.) This is due to the sci-fi and fantasy world’s twist on Andrea Rubenstein’s video game based concept of the the usual amount of racism:

It starts with a primarily white universe*. If you really look at the worlds that the majority of games, even today, are set in, you’ll most likely notice a pattern: protagonists, antagonists, and random NPCs will tend to be white more often than not. You can read more about this trend, which is not confined to video games, in the post Why is the Universe full of White people? over at Angry Black Woman Blog.

The usual amount of racism doesn’t stop with the relative invisiblity of non-white characters, though. It extends to the concept that every non-white character that exists does so in a marked (versus the unmarked white) state. The marking of a character can be through comments drawing attention to the character’s race and/or through the use of clear racial stereotypes.

And, we fen of color know that generally, if we want to dip a toe in new worlds, they are going to be filled to bursting with white folks. As Angry Black Woman wrote a few years back:

12 colonies or planets filled with humans. So far I have seen exactly 2 black people (one was killed 42 minutes after he showed up on the screen), one Asian person (who isn’t even human, she’s a Cylon in disguise), one Latino person (whose son, for some crazy reason, is played by a white dude), and that’s it. The rest of the people are all white. White people everywhere. This is stupid. If you have billions of humans on 12 planets I refuse to believe that only the white people would survive. Statistics say so. Unless there weren’t many black people on the colonies to begin with. [...]

White, heterosexual men have the luxury of being able to turn to 99% of the channels beamed into their TVs and see themselves portrayed in a manner that makes them comfortable and happy. Most white women, do, too. Minorities of most any stripe do not have that luxury. This is especially true of ethnic minorities. Why do we ‘bean count’? Because we can. That’s not flippancy, that’s a fact. I can look at my TV and count the number of black people I see because there are so few of them and they tend to stand out in the sea of whiteness.

When we bring up this line of reasoning, rabid fans trot out foolish justifications. My personal favorite: “Black people weren’t everywhere.”

*DEEP EYEROLL*

Shakespeare wrote Othello, The Moor of Venice in the fucking 1600s. Why the hell are people still using that tired ass excuse for writers who were around for the end of segregation? Octavia Butler once said in an interview that you can confront supposedly progressive science fiction writers with their all white worlds, and many of them will be forced to admit something is wrong, just by simple logic and common sense. Yet, this madness keeps happening, even once the issue is pointed out.

Anyway, Game of Thrones is on HBO. I’ve been a fan of the series ever since a friend of mine and I swapped fantasy novels one afternoon at my apartment – he gave me A Game of Thrones, the first in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, and I gave him Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart. I devoured the series, even though it isn’t my normal cup of tea, and ran straight into Martin’s bout of writer’s block. A Feast for Crows dropped in November of 2005, a few weeks after I had caught up with the other three. And after that was over, it’s been half a decade since I’ve immersed myself in that world. (How long has it been? We stopped doing the book exchange before my friend even thought about having a baby – the kid is now three. I hadn’t even heard of Mixed Media Watch then, I think it was still on Xenga. I stopped checking Martin’s blog for updates back in 2008. And Jacqueline Carey has concluded three story arcs across three generations across Terre D’Ange, Ch’in, and all points in between.)

Still, I was excited enough for the series. I had already resigned myself to whatever background noise style racism was going to be in the series, having read all the books. Swallowed my bluepill, prepared to head happily into Westero with a minimum of drama. Was it too much to ask that I would be able to enjoy the show in peace? Could I just keep my bottle of Jameson at the ready for the inevitable “Winter is Coming” reference, make my little rules for the drinking game (imps, nipples, incest are already marked), and figure out if the adaptation measures up to the books?

Nope. Instead, I got racism in my fandom (thanks to Drago and the Dothraki), and sexism from the mainstream media.

*Sigh.* Where do we even begin?

(Also, beyond this point, there are MASSIVE BOOK AND SHOW SPOILERS. You have been warned.)

Let’s start with the racefail. I’ve been flinching all week as reviewers and fans throw around the term “barbarian” like it’s going out of style. The Dothraki can be interpreted a few different ways, but are described in the book as having copper skin and almond-shaped eyes. They are described by the language creators as “a cross between the Mongols and some of the Native American tribes.”

Even the actor playing him, Jason Momoa, describes Drogo as ” a savage beast.”

And they did place heavy emphasis on othering the Dothraki. In the book, Khal Drago can speak the Common Tongue, which allows him to communicate with Daenerys (also known as Dany) which leads to them establishing trust. (If memory serves, he also pretends not to know Common Tongue, in order to eavesdrop on the unsuspecting.) In this version, he doesn’t. The creators felt like it added more “authenticity” to strip Drogo of the Common Tongue and have him only converse in Dothraki – but I’m not so sure. Why wouldn’t Drogo, leader of a nomadic tribe, have picked up a few more languages in the course of his travels? There is much made of the idea that the Dothraki don’t have a word for thank you – but a society that has no use for the languages of others, even as they allow white folks who have learned a bit of Dothraki into their circles? Highly suspect. Still, it’s all part and parcel to that “savage barbarian” coding.

I’m left with a lingering question – who is supposed to be a savage here? The producers of the show gave the Dothraki all the markers of the other – less clothing, no real concern about murder, unclean food preparation. And yet, I didn’t walk away from the books with that impression. Now, mind, all the plot points have played out for me (so half the time, when they’re introducing someone in the series, I’m thinking: yeah, whatever, that mofo is dead by book two, anyway) so I may be forgetting the beginning details of Daenerys’ relationship with Drogo. Still, from her creepy, traditionally inclined toward incest, “don’t make me unleash the dragon” toolbag of a brother, being sold to Khal Drogo was the beginning of her life upgrade. Instead of being her brother’s whipping girl, her arranged marriage worked out well, with her eventually loving the guy enough to call him “her sun and stars.” Drogo kills the d-bag brother, and when he dies she relies on his memory to carry on to her new destiny – reclaiming the throne in Westeros.

So I’m at a bit of a loss as to how exactly the Dothroki got stuck with the barbarian title. It only makes sense in a void that does not include the regular activities in Westeros. Jamie Lannister’s blond kingslaying knight doesn’t get that, even though he’s also fucking his twin sister and decided it would be a great idea to chuck a nine year old out of a castle window. One of the new chapters shows a demented king flaying people’s toes and fingers and then leaving them to eat the mutilated digits or go insane with pain. Tyrion (under familial duress and false information, admittedly) destroys his first wife by participating in a gangbang designed to humiliate her publicly. And don’t get me started on Cersei Lannister.

Can you even make it through a chapter without some serial killer-esque madness going down? Every time I read this series, this song gets stuck in my head:

I mean, really – how are we defining barbarian, anyway? Scary and sociopathic dark haired people? Because let’s stop fronting – all the fair haired, scary, and sociopathic people in the GRRM stories are fucked up too – so in the context of Westeros, I don’t think the term barbarian holds any weight. There is no “civilized” society to compare the Dothraki to!

This whole “barbarians” thing reminds me of one of my favorite historical bastardizations:

Before we depart from Drogo-land, I did want to point out one other logical fallacy. Over at io9, Charlie Jane Anders brought up potential stickiness with the depiction of the Dothraki, saying:

the ambiguously brown Dothraki horse lords may feel like too much of a “noble savage” stereotype to some viewers, and you may be hearing a lot about people’s discomfort with the Dothraki scenes in weeks to come.

So, right on time, cue the commenter employing the fallacious flip:

Ram-Sacked
[...] p.s. For those people fretful that brown Dothraki will be poorly portrayed because they are brown, I can assure you that there have been plenty of awful societies here on Earth that were owned and operated by brown people. Brown people, just like white people, can and will be pretty awful some times. (Edit comment)

Right. And brown people, just like white people, can be awesome and heroic, but that never seems to happen for us. Perhaps one could claim ignorance about all ancient civilizations that don’t revolve around Europe (which is a tough sell, but considering what I learned in school, I’ll bite). But then that doesn’t explain the whitening of the handful of universes that aren’t completely white by creator design (oh, hai Earthsea!)

There’s a reason why Racebending had shirts made up with this logo:

And still, people act like they don’t understand why we are so pissed. Back in the day, we had legalized segregation keeping brown faces off movie and television screens. Now, those laws have officially ended, but we can always count on other fans to keep segregation alive and well.

Moving on to gender.

So then, right before the debut of A Game of Thrones, Ginia Bellafante, writing for the New York Times, decided to get super sexist on fandom, and explain in her review that GoT tacked a bunch of sex on to the series to entice female viewers who wouldn’t touch fantasy with a ten foot pole:

“Game of Thrones” is a cast-of-at-least-many-hundreds production, with sweeping “Braveheart” shots of warrior hordes. Keeping track of the principals alone feels as though it requires the focused memory of someone who can play bridge at a Warren Buffett level of adeptness. In a sense the series, which will span 10 episodes, ought to come with a warning like, “If you can’t count cards, please return to reruns of ‘Sex and the City.’ ” [...]

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

So much fail in a few short paragraphs.

One – who said SATC fans can’t be GoT fans? I am not the only person alive that got enjoyment out of both, for different reasons. I don’t expect Carrie Bradshaw and crew to suddenly roll out on an epic quest (remember how big of a deal it was for them to go to Brooklyn?). And I don’t expect anyone but Sansa to start worrying about landing the hottest boy and the cutest dress in the realm while they are in the middle of a bloody, multihouse battle for the throne. Apples and oranges, really. Also, since when is SATC the benchmark for women’s entertainment? I have a great many friends who watched SATC – now we talk about Burn Notice and Sons of Anarchy.

Two – It’s a pretty well known fact that women drive the slash fiction sides of fandom (and how!) but seriously – all that sex was already in there. That was GRRM’s doing.

Three – What kind of whack ass book clubs does she belong to? The book club I’m in has read Freedom, In Defense of Food, Eating Animals, The Pilot’s Wife, and now we are on The Mother Tongue, which is a book for language nerds. I’m planning to propose an essay collection for the next one, since I still haven’t read Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind or Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously. All these things are based on whatever we think is interesting reading. My friend who started the book club reads less genre than we used to, but since we bonded over Edward Rutherford’s London back in middle school, I doubt she’d have an issue with Game of Thrones. (In fact, I found it infinitely less painful than suffering though reading Freedom.) Sounds like Bellafante needs to expand her social circle.

Four - Boy-shaving scenes aside, most of this sex isn’t the sexy kind. It’s the rape, domination, incest kind. Some people may get off on that, but when GRRM employs sex scenes and rape scenes, they normally illustrate power dynamics between characters, more than any actual desire between players. Ain’t no seduction round here.

Five – Please don’t pearl clutch on behalf of women everywhere. Quite a few of us are fine with gory and grim portraits of humanity.

GRRM has the best response, as he must have been perplexed at the “Boy Fiction” label:

I am not going to get into it myself, except to say (1) if I am writing “boy fiction,” who are all those boys with breasts who keep turning up by the hundreds at my signings and readings?
and (2) thank you, geek girls! I love you all.

Amy Ratcliffe, over on Tor, also debunked that idea, and added:

All this said, it is a review and Ms. Bellafante is entitled to her opinion (though I don’t think it’s much of a review—as Daniel Fienberg points out, it doesn’t mention a single actor, character or plot point). The purpose of reviews is for stating opinions. She didn’t like the show, so what? But reviews are not for making sweeping generalizations about women. Generalizations that also happen to be incorrect. I understand that she may not personally know any geek girls. That doesn’t mean we don’t exist. One giant brush cannot paint all women the same color. It’s presumptuous for anyone to think they can do so.

Some folks have pointed out some of the gendered dynamics to the review and to the responses at large, especially the knee-jerk dismissals that popped up around female focused fandom and the way in which male focused outlets described the show (“Beheadings, Barbarians and Boobies?” Keep it classy, IGN…)

All of these issues speak to two larger issues – the idea that fandom is for men, and broader ideas of what is gender appropriate.

But most of the folks reading here are living, breathing, argument slayers (i.e. statistically, the average reader of Racialicious is a woman of color interested in social issues and pop culture with a heavy interest in general geekery) so I’ll just say to hell with it.

As a brown girl gone geeky, I’m used to being invisible in plain sight. (One of these days, I will have to share the story of arguing down some white dude who decided to question my geek cred while I was talking about Dune.) And you know what? Sometimes, it’s a relief. I made an informed choice to sink into GRRM’s Westeros, with all it’s race and gender issues. Issues aside, I still think it’s an amazing series, and I can’t wait for A Dance with Dragons to finally drop in June.

Now if I could just get all these other people to stop fucking up my bluepill buzz, I’d be set.